Losing the Nobel Prize: on careers in science

Losing the Nobel Prize by Brian Keating, a cosmology professor at UCSD, contains a tell-it-like-it-is description of the life of a scientist (see the previous posting regarding this book). Examples:

Battle is an apt metaphor for what we scientists do. There is a fierce competition that begins the day you declare yourself a physics major. First, among your fellow undergraduates, you spar for top ranking in your class. This leads to the next battle: becoming a graduate student at a top school. Then, you toil for six to eight years to earn a postdoc job at another top school. And finally, you hope, comes a coveted faculty job, which can become permanent if you are privileged enough to get tenure. Along the way, the number of peers in your group diminishes by a factor of ten at each stage, from hundreds of undergraduates to just one faculty job becoming available every few years in your field. Then the competition really begins, for you compete against fellow gladiators honed in battle just as you are. You compete for the scarcest resource in science: money. Surprisingly, not by brains alone does science progress; funding is its true lifeblood. Cosmology’s primary funding agency is the National Science Foundation. But the NSF proposal success rate is currently only about 20%, across all fields of physics and math: the lowest it has been in over a decade.

If you pick science as a career at age 18, how long before you can know whether or not you’ll be successful?

A recent article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences written by Ronald Daniels, the president of Johns Hopkins University, found that the average age of a first-time recipient of a nationally funded grant has increased from under thirty-eight in 1980 to over forty-five as of 2013.20 More disturbingly, the fraction of first-time recipients aged thirty-six or younger has plummeted from 18% in 1983 to 3% in 2010. The awful conclusion of the study is this: “Without their own funding, young researchers are prevented from starting their own laboratories, pursuing their own research, and advancing their own careers in academic science.” With the success rate so low, the study continues, “it is not surprising that many of our youngest minds are choosing to leave their positions in academic research for careers in industry, other countries, or outside of science altogether.”

So you just have to give it at least 27 years! (from 18-45, assuming that the trend hasn’t continued since 2013) Make sure that your ideas aren’t too novel. Professor Keating cites a study that “once projects go beyond a modest level of novelty, the probability they’ll be funded decreases as their perceived novelty increases.”

The Nobel Prize makes a competitive situation more ruthless:

Yet Mother Nature herself, so red in tooth and claw, couldn’t have devised a more efficient means of incentivizing bitter competition than the Nobel Prize. Indeed, the competition in science is at least as ferocious as in any corporate boardroom; there are many billion-dollar corporations, but the Nobel Prize is science’s most closely held monopoly. Most nonscientists think science is conducted by altruistic boffins, happy to find gainful employment doing work that they uniquely are capable of. Yet competition and science go hand in hand, and have done so since the invention of the scientific method itself.

But there is an important distinction between artistic innovation and scientific discovery. As historian of science Derek de Solla Price opined, “If Michelangelo or Beethoven had not existed, their works would have been replaced by quite different contributions. If Copernicus or Fermi had never existed, essentially the same contributions would have had to come from other people. There is, in fact, only one world to discover, and as each morsel of perception is achieved, the discoverer must be honored or forgotten.” Honor comes to those who do not wait.

In keeping with the zeitgest, the book contains a section titled “Women and the Nobel Prize in Physics”. According to the book, only 2 out of 207 laureates in physics have been “women.” Does this analysis make sense given what we now know about the fluidity of gender ID? How do we know that Marie Curie actually identified as a woman? Could it be that Werner Heisenberg identified as a woman, but was afraid that his Nazi Party colleagues would have been hostile to a gender reassignment?

Suppose that we were willing to make cisgender-normative assumptions and deny the fluidity of gender.

Currently, women make up an unfortunately small fraction, approximately 20%, of the physics faculties at major U.S. research institutions. But that fraction dwarfs the percentage of female physics laureates by a factor of twenty. All other fields—including economics, the newest comer on the Nobel circuit, with one female laureate compared to seventy-five male winners—have a higher percentage of female laureates. Physicists are now asking themselves how the lack of gender diversity is affecting the career choices of young women. And even Nobel Prize winners like Brian Schmidt are speaking up against the prize’s lack of gender diversity.

The lack of diversity in prizewinners gives the message to a young woman deciding on her choice of profession that in physics women are not equally valued. A vicious cycle results in which women fail to enter the field, denying younger women role models; it is the anti-Matthew effect. Women disproportionately miss out on the Nobelist’s noblesse-oblige phenomenon where “Scientists who as young men worked with a laureate received the award at an average age of forty-four, nine years earlier than men who had not.”

Professor Keating proposes awarding the prize to dead women and also patching up some previous prizes retroactively:

future committees can correct past instances of the “Matilda effect,” Margaret Rossiter’s term for the phenomenon wherein men get credit for discoveries that were made by women. The history of the Nobel Prize is replete with examples of this, from Rosalind Franklin’s lost credit for co-discovering DNA to Lise Meitner’s snubbing after she discovered the foundations of nuclear fission.

Awarding Vera Rubin the first posthumous prize would be immensely inspiring to young physicists, and specifically to women. But even if the committee is unwilling to restore posthumous eligibility, it should ensure justice for 1974 Nobel Prize Matilda effect victim Jocelyn Bell Burnell; the prize was awarded to her thesis advisor for the serendipitous discovery of pulsars which she made. Thankfully, Bell Burnell is still very much alive.

Assuming that women behave rationally, most of the book is consistent with “The More Gender Equality, the Fewer Women in STEM” (Atlantic). In a society where nearly every job is available to women, why would a woman take a 27-year chance on becoming successful as a physicist, with the risk that, if unsuccessful, she would be out on the street at age 45, her fertility exhausted? (see my “Women in Science” article on why the more interesting question is “Why are there men in science?”)

The author himself suffers a setback that would be almost inconceivable for a physician, for example (since doctors are scarce in the U.S. whereas there is a huge glut of physics PhDs compared to tenure-track jobs):

Then, one day, a mere six months after I defended my PhD, as I was lost in thought again, Sarah Church walked into the lab and told me she was unhappy with my performance, my attitude, and my work ethic. For the first time in my life, I was fired—my career ended before it even started. I couldn’t help but think this was yet another ironic parallel with my hero, Galileo: both of us had been on the wrong side of the Church. I couldn’t argue with Sarah. I had it coming. The months I’d spent fantasizing about new telescopes were months I should have been working on her projects.

He recovers from this, of course, and his ability and drive were eventually sufficient to earn tenure at the University of California. So the author himself could arguably inspire young people in the same way that Shah Rukh Khan or Michael Jordan might inspire young people to go into acting or professional sports. However, the survivorship bias here should be obvious. The physics postdocs who were fired and went into selling mortgages or teaching high school (starting at age 40 a career that others start at 22) do not write books.

My take-away from the careers aspect of the book is that if you (1) love competition, (2) have a huge appetite for risk, (3) don’t mind working long hours for a minimum of 27 years until getting that first grant, and (4) are mostly indifferent to money, pursuing a physics PhD and an academic job might be a reasonable plan. You’ll get to work with a lot of smart people, for sure, but, as the book notes, quite of few of them may be planning to stab you in the back when it comes time to assign credit for a Nobel-worthy discovery. It is not like most other fields of human endeavor where there is room for everyone to excel in his or her own way.

More: read Losing the Nobel Prize.

Related:

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Broody hen compared to gravid human in the office

“Human Husbandry” by Elaine Ou is fun:

Domestication is a rather unnatural form of selection. As a population’s per-capita GDP increases, average fertility decreases. This phenomenon has been termed the demographic-economic paradox, but it’s really not paradoxical at all. Raising children carries a huge opportunity cost – remove this cost and the population has way more productive capacity. It’s no coincidence that San Francisco, home of the most advanced civilization in the world, also has the lowest share of children out of any major city in the country.

Just as a broody hen negatively impacts a farmer’s productivity, a gravid human poses a significant inconvenience to her employer. That’s why companies like Google, Facebook, and Apple pay for female employees to extract and freeze their eggs. It’s great to see tech companies empowering women the same way that factory farms empower their battery hens!

Marc Andreessen and his wife hired a surrogate to carry their biological child. While not scalable, it’s always heartwarming to see billionaires take time out of their busy lives to reproduce like the rest of us mere mortals. Even if it does involve some outsourcing.

She also writes about Bitcoin:

Paul Krugman doesn’t know anything about anything, but I’ll grant him this one: There’s nothing to backstop a cryptocurrency’s value! If people come to believe that Bitcoin is worthless, it’s worthless. There’s no tether to reality.

One of the greatest tragedies of modern money is the decoupling between a store and display of wealth. Or, more accurately, the societal decoupling between wealth and status. For most of human history, the functions of display and storage were condensed. Even before people wore clothing, they wore piercings and tattoos. A full-body ink job isn’t transferable, but it’s a sort of proof of work.

here’s a better way to flaunt crypto wealth. … Secure multi-party computations were first introduced in 1982 as a solution to the Millionaires’ Problem: Multiple millionaires want to know their relative wealth standing, but no one wants to reveal their actual net worth.

One solution is to distribute shares of a secret to each participant. Each person combines the secret with the value of their net worth, broadcasts the result, and a blinded function processes the values to arrive at the final rankings. This function evaluation forms the basis for a zero-knowledge proof.

This can be done with any cryptocurrency. Instead of self-reporting a net worth, each participant signs a message to prove ownership of an account. The message is combined with a secret share, resulting in an output that indicates the user’s balance relative to everyone else. Turn the output into crypto-bling by mapping it to a unique identicon. Bitcoin can now be used as a visual display of wealth.

(This would work against “Secret bitcoin billionaires will renounce their U.S. citizenship before cashing in?“)

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Be skeptical about global warming but buy a house on higher ground

Back in 2016 I wrote “Are markets so inefficient that global warming isn’t being priced properly?

If sea level rise is imminent, why were people willing to pay $8 million for a Ft. Lauderdale house that was “approximately the same height above sea level as a crushproof cigarette pack”?

Three Harvard eggheads have looked at this more carefully in “Climate gentrification: from theory to empiricism in Miami-Dade County, Florida” (Environmental Research Letters, April 23, 2018)

They have to work pretty hard, but they do find a correlation between height above sea level and price appreciation.

Related:

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California is the center of American racism?

“Number One in Poverty, California Isn’t Our Most Progressive State — It’s Our Most Racist One” (Forbes) is kind of fun in the same way as me offering my neighbors with the Black Lives Matter posters a minivan ride down to the Fresh Pond McDonald’s for a viewing of some people of color.

For me the most powerful part of the argument concerns real estate regulation and taxation. By making it tough to build anything new, California enriches owners of existing property. Most of these folks are white or Chinese investor visa immigrants. Prop 13 taxes long-time homeowners at much lower rates than recent home buyers. Guess what color the average person who has been in the same house since 1978 is?

California also has sales taxes, which are regressive, much higher than what other states charge.

The author attacks Califronia for running public schools for the benefit of unionized school employees and the politicians who receive their reliable votes. Nobody in California cares what the students learn. But how is that different from other states?

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Modern Sequels to the Marriage of Figaro?

Some music-oriented friends and I were trying to come up with titles for modern operas that would be sequels to The Marriage of Figaro.

We quickly came up with

  • The Divorce of Figaro
  • The New Gender Identity of Figaro

But then we stalled out.

Readers: What would be a good update to this 18th century story? It has to be something that is reasonably likely to happen in the 21st century, but not in the 18th century.

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Explaining World War II to a young person

A friend’s son was playing violin in a chamber music concert recently. At the after-party we were chatting about summer plans with the violist. I mentioned plans to go to Oshkosh (more propertly, EAA AirVenture) and noted that people who have restored World War I and World War II airplanes will fly them in. She looked politely blank so my friend said “Those were wars before you were born.” I added “Donald Trump was leading the Germans in World War II. Well… actually it was someone who was very much like Donald Trump.”

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If you’re going to let academically weak students into your exam schools, why have exam schools?

“In a Twist, Low Scores Would Earn Admission to Select Schools” (nytimes):

Students with low test scores are usually shut out of New York City’s best public schools.

But next year, such students could be offered a quarter of the sixth-grade seats at even the most selective middle schools in Manhattan’s District 3 as part of a desegregation plan being debated in the district, which stretches from the Upper West Side to Harlem.

The plan is unusual because it focuses explicitly on low-performing students, and seeks to achieve “academic diversity” across the district’s middle schools.

Although it might be the last race-neutral government program in the U.S., I have never been a huge fan of the NY system of sending the smart kids off to a nerd farm. It seems unfair to those who are left behind. They’ll never see the top 10 percent of achievers and therefore will overestimate their abilities. If I were a school dictator, I would set up individualized instruction and extra challenges delivered to the brightest students who stay within a regular school, reserving the magnet schools for special subjects such as arts and music.

If New York is now going to have quotas for academically weak students in their schools for the academically strong, I wonder if it wouldn’t be more sensible to tear down the entire exam school system. Just have “schools” that can cater to both the good and bad students.

Readers: What do you think? Does an exam school become pointless if people who fail the exam are also admitted?

[Separately, a friend’s daughter recently graduated from what is perhaps America’s toughest high school: Stuveysant. She crushed the entrance exam, got grades near the top of her class, and scored 1580 out of 1600 on the SATs. She rejected advice to “pull an Elizabeth Warren” and check a box to identify as a member of a victim group. She was in turn rejected by Yale, despite being, objectively, one of the best-educated 18-year-olds in the United States. To me this shows just how tough the U.S. has become for young people. When I was in high school (late 1970s), anyone who was reasonably bright and willing to work hard would get into an Ivy League college. To young people who might be impressed that I have an undergrad degree from MIT… close to 50 percent of people who applied to become members of the Class of 1982 were admitted. It was a different world!]

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How to demolish and build green without guilt

Our town wants to demolish a 140,000 sf school that is in basically good condition and replace it with a “Net Zero” building (I created a mini-site just for my thoughts on this school). A handful of the town’s environmentalists question the “greenness” of pushing an apparently usable building into a landfill.

My brilliant idea to relieve the guilt: Tesla bulldozer. Model B!

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